


Straight on 'til Morning

by RecessiveJean



Category: Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Gen, Outer Space, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 01:36:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1100876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Walter played the game, things went all to pieces. Lucky for him, he got a re-roll.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Straight on 'til Morning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladysorka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysorka/gifts).



Some of the cards were different the first time they played. Walter wouldn’t figure that out until he was twenty four years old, but as soon as he did, he wasn’t sure if he should be hopeful, resentful, or just plain terrified. He decided to be a little of each. It was okay to be a little of each, because this time he wasn’t going to screw it up.

The fleet admiral card was the same. That part was . . . well, it was useful, actually. Flinging it back in his own smug, snotty little face. Didn’t feel as good as he always thought it would, but there was a kind of ugly satisfaction all the same. _Stupid, selfish little kid, wishing your brother away_ . . .

Lisa would have told him he was being irrational, blaming a kid for being a kid. But that was Lisa, and unless you counted the iced-over Lisa-looking statue in the upstairs bathroom, Lisa wasn’t there.

She had been there the first time, though. After he wished Danny away, when he was sitting beside the game board, stabbing the defunct red button over and over and over again, sobbing, Lisa had come down the stairs and found him screaming at a piece of tin to give him back his brother.

“Walter,” she said, “what—” Then she registered the state of the first floor. “What the _hell_ did you little trolls do to the _house_?!”

So he told her everything. She wasn’t even all that difficult to convince, once he swung the front door open and showed her all of space swirling past their porch. She just stared, her mouth open, and finally said “ . . . oh.”

So that was the first time.

The first time, there was no stranded astronaut to rescue. There was just Walter and Lisa in a house that floated through space. Only it wasn’t _space_ -space. Walter noticed a few things that didn’t match up with what he’d learned in Science class, and when he pointed them out to Lisa, she asked what it meant.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I mean, some of the planets look okay. But others are the wrong size, and there are stars that shouldn’t be there, and some of the real ones are missing. It’s like . . . cartoon space.”

“Great,” said Lisa, “just what we need. The freaking Jetsons floating by, offering us a lift.”

But it wasn’t the Jetsons who found them. It was a medical transport station, loaded with emergency care personnel and some very sick people. They took Walter and Lisa on board.

“What about our house?” Walter wondered. Lisa just gave him that _look_.

“Shut up, Walter. We can’t stay here.”

So they left the house behind, the house where he’d wished away his brother and cost them every chance of ever getting home again. They were shepherded to an empty transport bay, the kind of place where sick people were carried. Only this one was empty.

“What happened to the last guys?” Walter wanted to know. The nurse on duty blinked at them above her sterile white mask.

“Oh,” said Lisa. Then she sat on the floor and refused to touch the beds, no matter how stupid Walter told her she was being.

“They would have cleaned everything up afterward. Boiled it, or put pesticides or something.”

“Disinfectant, Walter,” Lisa muttered. “In hospitals it’s called disinfectant.”

Lisa taught him that. She taught him other things too, those first years. They docked at a base on a planet called Keville 7, and were offloaded with various medical supplies. It took the dockworkers almost an hour to realise there were two kids among the bales of bandages, and it took them another hour to figure out what to do about it.

That was how Walter and Lisa got taken to the council house, and interviewed about what happened to them. It was all carefully recorded in a retro-looking steel box, then locked away in a shiny grey wall.

The council of Keville 7 awarded Walter and Lisa Refugee Status, Class 2, which meant they were recognised as coming from nowhere, belonging to nobody, and too young to work for a living.

“It’s like a whole pile of insults, this thing,” Lisa muttered, tugging at her shiny new ID tag. “Don’t ever let them stick you with this, Walter. Soon as we can, we’re getting out of here.”

Even then, somehow, Lisa had recognised that the system was out to get them. They were both given spots in trade schools when spots became available, which meant Lisa ended up training for what they called a food services technician, which meant she had to balance all the vitamins and proteins in their prepared food, and Walter learned to repair boilers.

Sometimes, as he sat in classes and listened to the master craftsmen lecture, he forgot this wasn’t always what he had done. Then he’d get home at night and Lisa would be waiting for him, red eyed, bone weary, and she’d make him say it, over and over again:

“We are getting out of here. We do not belong. We are going home.”

The problem was, home wasn’t. They’d asked about Earth as soon as they got there, but the Earth these people knew about was not their own. It was, as Lisa had snarked earlier, a kind of Jetsons-type place. And Walter and Lisa, as Class 2 Refugees, had about as much chance of going there as they did of getting back to their own Earth.

“Should have kept the game,” Lisa said, one night. She slept in the bunk below his, because after the last Zorgon attack Walter had got scared something was hiding under his bed.

Lisa could have said “man up, you’re twelve,” but instead she just said “fine, top bunk’s for crybabies anyway” which was Lisa-code for something really nice and big-sisterly. Lisa just couldn’t do nice like normal people, and Walter had learned to live with that.

“I told you,” said Walter, staring at the ceiling, “it didn’t work.”

“Yeah but maybe I could have played for him. You know? Like a stand-in. We used to do that when we were little. I’d play for you when you went to the bathroom.”

“Yeah. And you cheated.”

“I never.”

“Liar.”

Then the ache in his chest, the longing for his brother, cut deep and sharp like a knife, and Walter cried.

It was like that until Lisa got her trade placement. Then Walter got assigned a new bunkmate, and Lisa was moved to the adult pods. A part of her pay was deducted to cover the rent, and Walter heard her fighting with housing about it. All of it.

“If you’re taking my money anyway, do I get a say about which shithole you stick me in? I want to stay with my brother, do you hear? He’s all I’ve got. I want Walter.”

Housing hadn’t budged, so they took to eating lunches together instead. Walter turned thirteen. Then fourteen. Lisa started getting nervous, because there were only so many boilers to be repaired, and she thought they might try to send Walter away.

“One of the satellite moons, maybe,” she muttered. Lisa tended to think out loud more than have an actual conversation with you. Walter had gotten used to that, so he just eavesdropped, and waited for a chance to pipe in.

“We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen. Going to be a pain in the ass to get home again if we aren’t even on the same planet.”

She didn’t bring it up again until just before his nineteenth birthday. He was tall by then; tall, and skinny. He hoped muscles would come with time—a lot of the guys he worked with were thick as tree trunks—but for now, he and his sister had eerily similar builds.

Lisa wore her hair short now, cut blunt and straight at her chin. She said it made it easier to put up in a hairnet. She had grease-spatter scars all up her arms, and Walter remembered counting them that day as she sat across from him and told him her plan.

“They give out the assignments on the second-last day of classes. That’s the day we’ve got to run. I checked the schedule; the medi-pod is coming by that morning. We’ll hop on board and stow away. They’ll probably find us soon after, but as long as we stay hidden til they’re in air, they won’t turn back.”

“Shouldn’t we wait?” Walter wondered. “I mean, I might not even get sent away.”

“Are you kidding? We’re over capacity here. I hear them talking about it all the time. Honest to God, Walter, don’t you pay attention?”

Walter shrugged, and sucked back another mouthful of his protein paste.

“Don’t you miss real food?”

“Shut up. It’s good for you.”

“Spoken like a true graduate of Keville 7 Culinary Trades and Support Staff Technical Institute.”

“Shut up,” said Lisa again, but this time she sounded like she meant it, so Walter shut up.

He also stayed to get his assignment. He’d think about that day for five years afterward, about how he’d just assumed Lisa wouldn’t leave when he didn’t show. That she’d see he had made up his mind, and she’d yell at him for it, but that would be it.

He never thought she’d leave without him.

He found out two weeks later exactly what had happened. He might have found out sooner if he’d been Lisa—she had a way of badgering people into talking to her—but Walter was still a little nervous of people in the official blue jumpsuits. So it was two weeks until somebody condescended to tell him that a Class 2.1 Refugee, female, had stowed away on a quarantined medi-pod. She had contracted the disease contained on board, and was reported deceased two days ago.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Walter asked. His voice shook the way that always made Lisa call him Whiny Walter. The man in the blue jumpsuit did not call him that; merely stared straight ahead and said “need to know basis.”

So Walter had farmed his services out to the next transport that came through, accepted the near slave wage offered, and left Keville 7 behind for good.

The transport turned out to be the best choice he ever made. He stuck with it for three years, just because he liked the atmosphere. They ferried people from planet to planet, people who didn’t make enough to own private spacecraft, and he got to know some of them really well. While he worked on whatever odd jobs wanted doing, he got to chatting with the passengers. It was a little weird at first, talking to people who talked back, and didn’t insult him as a form of affection, but he got used to it. Told a little of his story too, with some careful edits . . . but the selective omissions hadn’t fooled Jethro.

Jethro was the shrunken old man in the smallest compartment on the ship. He lived in there surrounded by gears and tubes and bits of glass, and he loved to hear Walter talk. One day, out of the blue, three years after Walter had come aboard the transpo, Jethro asked him:

“Walter, what’s your greatest mistake?”

“What?” said Walter.

“Your greatest mistake,” Jethro repeated. “I don’t mean the kind you learn from, in that bullshit way we tell folk they have to do. I mean the one that screwed up your life so bad, you’d cut off your own arm for the chance to make it right.”

Walter just stared.

“Right,” said Jethro. “Well then, tell me later.”

That night, Walter dreamed as he hadn’t in years. He dreamed about that day playing catch on the front lawn, and the look on Danny’s face. He dreamed about his frozen-solid sister who thawed just in time to get his butt out of that house, onto the medi-pod, and into some vague kind of life that kept him safe til he got old enough to leave and make a life for himself.

He dreamed of Danny and Lisa, Danny and Lisa, over and over and over again.

Then he woke up, right in the middle of the ship-designated sleep cycle, and he climbed the ladder into the passenger wing. He went to Jethro’s compartment, tapped himself in, and woke the man up to tell him the truth.

Every word of it.

Jethro nodded, bright-eyed and thoughtful, like he’d maybe suspected all along.

“Right,” he said, “well then. Let’s get to work.”

That day Walter signed on as Jethro’s apprentice, and moved into the cramped little compartment to help work on the Thing Jethro was building. When Jethro told him what it was, honestly. Walter hadn’t believed it. But then Jethro looked him in the eye and said “son, you told me that a magical kiddy toy got you and your brother and sister sucked right into an alternate dimension where you’re the only one to survive . . . and you can’t handle the idea of a time machine? Pull the other one.”

So Walter kept his doubts to himself after that. Jethro did explain a little of what had driven him to invent the machine in the first place (“first I thought I’d made a mistake, you see. Took me maybe ten years to figure out it wasn’t such a mistake after all, and by then . . . well, I had the whole thing so nearly planned, I mostly just wanted to see if I could finish it. Figured I’d give it to some other fella who had really made a mistake. You’re him”) and they spent the next two years building the suit, and finishing the machine. Then Jethro saw him suited up and strapped in, slapped him on the back and said “safe travels, now.”

Come to think of it, in lots of ways Jethro reminded Walter of Lisa. But before he could tell him that, Jethro had punched the appropriate button and kicked Walter into the airlock, so there was really no time for long good byes.

Yeah, actually: a whole lot like Lisa.

So there was the wormhole, and that was painful as all the words he’d never been allowed to say when he was a kid, and was too pressed for breath and guts and life to be able to say now. But he burst out the other side like a supernova, went careening across the galaxy and . . .

 _SPLAT_.

Like a bug on the windshield. He was knocking, shuffling, scrabbling frantically at the walls of his very own house. The house Lisa had made him leave when he was still just a dumb kid, hadn’t seen since he was still just that same dumb kid . . . that same dumb kid who was staring at him, only he wasn’t looking at that kid, he was looking at the little boy beside him, scruffy haired and big-eyed, the biggest mistake he’d never got to make.

And somewhere upstairs, he knew, Lisa was alive again.

Walter breathed in.

Walter breathed out.

He was _home_. And this time, he wasn’t going to screw it up.

**Author's Note:**

> I watched Zathura based on a chance rec, and I kind of forgot about it until I saw your prompt. Then all of a sudden I had to watch it again and again because . . . well of _course_ those are things that need answering, and how did I not wonder about them before?
> 
> I couldn't answer them all, but I hope you enjoyed these particular speculations!


End file.
